Monday, 28 November 2011

Game Production, Architectural Project Finished

So my house is finished. Overall I'm very happy with how the project has gone. It's way better than my previous house project for a start!

I initially had concerns with my texture budget, thinking I may have given myself too much to texture with only 8mb available but its actually come out quite well. Its surprising just how much you can fit onto a 1024pxl texture sheet whilst still maintaining quality. Also surprising how you can get get away with using smaller texture sheets (256pxl and 128 pxl) for tile-able textures, although one problem I found was with my actual reference images for the tile-able's. By using a digital SLR it meant that my reference photographs were of a very high quality, one photograph was over 7mb! and when I tried to scale them down to 256pxl or 128pxl, even 512pxl, there was a dramatic loss in quality. In the end my tile-able textures came out okay but its definitely something I can look at more in-depth in the future.

A quick look at the feedback I have received so far. My normal maps, for the windows of the house in particular were very 'blobby/ lumpy', I went back into Crazybump with the height map and reduced the large detail sliders to resolve this. One other point from feedback was regarding how I had presented my work, I was actually quite happy with my renders, I stayed up till 2.a.m. a few nights ago teaching myself how to use the daylight system in 3DS Max and using Mental Ray to render. But I have taken note on my presentation techniques and will look into that more in the very near future. Somebody also pointed out that I had missed a supporting beam from my reference photographs in my mesh, which was easily rectified.